This is the web version of dot.LA's daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California's tech, startup and venture capital scene. Earlier this week, West Hollywood-based startup Pearl announced that its Second Opinion product had become the first AI-enabled device cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to read dental x-rays. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Second Opinion is meant to help dentists find maladies they'd otherwise miss through the eye test. Getting FDA clearance is not easy, especially because Pearl had to prove its device could detect a variety of dental conditions (most medical devices have to prove only one capability).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can truly relieve some of the hiring and evaluation burdens of Human Resources (HR). But, there are several areas where it's just not ready to take the place of actual humans…

Daily Newsletter from Erling.A. Sjokvist - Wednesday, June 30 Your Daily Newsletter that Featuring!

With data science and artificial intelligence evolving on a daily basis, the magnitude of information it generates can sometimes be challenging to keep pace with. And that's why all these data science news websites and blogs come with their newsletter that continually churns out relevant and significant information for readers. An excellent form of curated content, newsletters can be extremely informative and insightful for data science professionals, students as well as business leaders. These weekly newsletters provide updated trends of the industry, latest news, different methodologies as well as information on new technologies that can be an exciting learning resource for many. Further, with such a vast amount of information, it is critical for all to stay away from clickbait as well as fake news, and these newsletters can be the perfect rescue for the same.

Editor's note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. IT IS A testament to the machinery of science that so much has been learned about covid-19 so rapidly. Since January the number of publications has been doubling every 14 days, reaching 1,363 in the past week alone. They have covered everything from the genetics of the virus that causes the disease to computer models of its spread and the scope for vaccines and treatments.

I've been thinking about how Amazon takes a chaos-energy attitude towards developing ecosystems around its products. When it's trying to get third parties to work with its products, Amazon throws open the doors and invites all comers. When it's making new products itself, Amazon is much more likely than anybody else to just do whatever it wants, sometimes aggressively. Sometimes that leads to hilarious Alexa products like rings that listen to your whisper when you push a button on it, IR blasters, and Alexa party games. Other times it leads to corporate synergy with a burgeoning police interest in surveillance.

The BBC is launching its own voice assistant, appropriately called'Beeb' (though the efficacy of that wake word is completely suspect in a world where people might talk about Justin Bieber, just saying). Upon hearing this news, you might be tempted to think, "Ugh, why? The Beeb assistant might be a boondoggle, a waste of British taxpayer money, and a classic example of the BBC making a tech thing without a super clear reason or need just because it can. In fact, I would put even money on it being all three of those things, but I'm still rooting for it anyway. Command Line is our daily newsletter about personal tech.

Gem Spa, the narrow twenty-four-hour newsstand on St. Mark's Place, has served as a nerve center for generations of beats, hippies (undeterred by a sign reading, "No Combing of Hair--By Order of Health Dept"), rockers, and punks. The other day, Lily Tomlin, who is seventy-six, stopped by in the hope of getting an egg cream. Encountering a long line of customers waiting to buy magazines and lottery tickets, her personal assistant, Paul (burly, doting), shuffled her out. "I used to live up the street--this is back in the sixties--on Fifth between Second and Third," Tomlin said. She wore a navy overcoat, a silk scarf, and sunglasses.

Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man--call him John--on the dating site OKCupid. John was attractive and charming. More notably, he indulged in the kind of profligate displays of affection which signal a definite eagerness to commit. He sneaked Suzanne's favorite snacks into her purse as a workday surprise and insisted early on that she keep a key to his apartment. He asked her to help him choose a couch and then spooned with her on all the floor models. He even accompanied her, unprompted, to the D.M.V.--an act roughly equivalent, in today's gallantry currency, to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster. As we learn from the podcast "Reply All," which reported the tale, Suzanne was not the only woman on whom John had chosen to bestow his favor. Six months into their relationship, she discovered that he was seeing half a dozen other women, one of whom he'd been stringing along for two years. All of them had received the couch-spooning treatment.

I never learned anything in the Saturday-morning Chinese school I was forced to attend as a child, but that's not what motivates my choice here. There were plenty of reasons for my poor performance in those classes--my resentment at having to miss the "Super Friends" cartoon being just one of them--so I don't blame Chinese characters for my failure. No, my objection is a practical one: I'm a fan of literacy, and Chinese characters have been an obstacle to literacy for millennia. With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn three thousand.